Sometimes Things Break

Coming Out of the Cold It's starting to get cold in Minnesota. People are dusting off their snowblowers and Holidazzle is about to make traffic in Minneapolis an absolute nightmare. It must mean that the fall theatre season is almost over. Soon our theaters will be full of holiday concerts and Dickens retreads and the streets will run silver with tinsel. And it's not even Thanksgiving yet, which is absolutely insane, people, but I will refrain from ranting about that here. I'm a curmudgeon about the cold, so, theatre folks, I'm going to need your help writing this column as we rush headlong into the mass consumption void called Christmas. If you have suggestions on performances to see over the holidays that will put a genuinely new spin on Christmas stories, please let me know in the comments. For now, onward with the week's news! Give 'Til It Hurts Well, Minnesota, you did it. You proved how generous and loving you are. Your outpouring of love and support was so overwhelming that you nearly suffocated a poor little website. Last week was the fifth annual Give to the Max Day. What started off as a promotion for the newly-formed donation facilitation site, GiveMN, has since turned into the largest single fundraising event for theaters and other non-profits into Minnesota. Every year since it started, Give to the Max Day has pulled in more and more donations, and this year it was overwhelming. The 52,000 people who donated online last Thursday were enough to crash the site's server, knocking it offline for five hours. GiveMN is still trying to puzzle out what went wrong. The fault appears to be with the tech provided for GiveMN by Razoo, whose servers couldn't seem to handle the traffic. It's anybody's guess as to how much additional money could have been raised. The total number of donors dropped by 1,000 from last year, but this year's event still raised a record $17.1 million, despite an announcement in July that GiveMN raised its processing fees from 2.9% to 4.9% in order to cover increased costs from Razoo. There are a lot of people complaining about how Give to the Max went this year. However, all the generous Minnesota donors out there should remember that you can donate to your favorite nonprofits any time. And, as I know several small theater companies discovered, there are other avenues for online donation, many of whom a little gem of a theater. Built in a renovated farm implement dealership by a string of volunteers and named for a local author, the Jon Hassler Theater has been in business for 14 years. Unfortunately, it was announced recently that the board of the Rural American Arts Partnership, which owns the theater, decided to shut its doors for good. The Jon Hassler Theater was one of a kind. CEO Dean Harrington actively sought out new and even experimental work to showcase at the 223-seat rural theater. Over the years, many small companies from the Twin Cities made the two-hour trek to Plainview to perform the original work they had created. Earlier this year, the theater even hosted a mini-festival featuring five different companies. However audience development has been a challenge. Despite all of the great, new, interesting work that has gone across the stage at the Hassler, the local audiences only showed up in droves for Don't Hug Me, and the board finally decided that this was not enough to sustain the theater. Make Your Own Stage The Minnesota Fringe Festival just rolled out a new re-design of its website, which means that it's time to start the Fringe cycle over again. Applications for the 2014 festival are available online right this second. Next year will be the 21st annual festival, and the first under new Executive Director Jeff D. Larson. Like last year, the Fringe will offer applicants a choice to put in for a small or large venue, but true to form, the Fringe is shaking a few other things up. The biggest change is the return of site-specific work to the festival. In years past, the Fringe had maintained a Bring Your Own Venue option which allowed participants to create new work outside of the regular Fringe venues. The intention was for the creation of site-specific work that could not otherwise fit into a normal Fringe venue; but the BYOV program was discontinued after 2010 for a variety of logistical reasons and complaints that the BYOV option was being used merely to circumvent the regular Fringe lottery process. The 2006 festival featured 23 BYOV performances, but the 2014 festival will have a limit of five Site Specific works, and the participants will be chosen by lottery if more than five companies apply. So get to work, Fringers! You've got a chance to put a play on in the craziest place you can imagine. So far, the craziest place has probably been a pool at the downtown YWCA; I'm daring all of you to top it. [Full disclosure: that "fringe show in a pool" that people occasionally reference was The Depth of the Ocean, which I wrote. And I am seriously daring people to top it, not as egotistical bragging, but because I really, really want this new Site Specific thing to last and to be seriously awesome.] Make Your Own Community The central corridor light rail line is now 97% complete. Years of building the line have disrupted the lives and business up and down the corridor, and the ArtPlace America has funded programs all over the country that use art to enrich and develop a community; and they're seeking applicants for the 2014 round of grants. If you think that St. Paul shouldn't be the only one getting in on the fun, get your community together, make a proposal and go for it.